The extent and severity of desertification in Australia has
been documented in several recent publications. The Commonwealth
government provided a national report and a case study of a
pastoral district in semi-arid Western Australia for the UN
Conference on Desertification in 1977 (Australia
1977;Williams,Suijendorp,andWilcox 1977). In 1978 a special
edition of Search (the journal of the Australian and New Zeaiand
Association for the Advancement of Science} was devoted to
desertification in Australia, with articles by a variety of
scientists (Condon 1978; Freer 1978; Mabbutt 1978a; Mulcahy 1978;
Pels 1978; M. Williams 1978; O. B. Williams 1978). A further
overall review of the problem was published by the Water Research
Foundation of Australia (Mabbutt 1978b), and in the same year a
national report on soil erosion in Australia appeared (D.E.H.C.D.
1978) and the South Australian government published its proposals
to cope with the salinity problems of the River Murray
(S.A.E.W.S.1978).

These reports provide evidence of the historical and spatial
extent of desertification and provide some information on the
cost to the Australian community. Thus the cost of national soil
conservation measures was estimated to be $675 million over the
period to the year 2000, and the South Australian plans to cope
with the River Murray salinity envisaged expenditure of $23.1
million. These cash figures do not include the costs of
production losses or relief and rehabilitation costs of the
drought which is usually associated with an acceleration of the
desertification process, costs which have been variously
estimated as from about $9 million to $100 million per year
(Heathcote 19791. While there is some debate on the actual
monetary cost of desertification in Australia, there can be no
doubt that the total is considerable. There can also be no doubt
that this cost in money is supplemented by less tangible costs
from the social disruption and psychological stresses associated
with the erosion of what may be termed a national heritage-the
physical landscape of Australia. Both the retreat of rural
settlement from parts of the margins of the Australian arid zone
and the thinning out of the densities of rural settlement (for
reasons which included the effects of desertification) have
caused hardship and stress which often have gone unchronicled.

This report therefore attempts to explain why a resource rich,
commercially oriented developed nation such as Australia can
provide the anomaly of successful resource development alongside
evidence of a deteriorating environment. The study is oriented to
one of the national problem areas-the Murray Mailee of southern
Australia- where the history of land settlement and the
associated environmental problems have been reasonably well
documented and where a field study of resource managers'
attitudes to the risks of resource management was recently
completed. Whlie conclusions from the study must be related
basically to the area of investigation, l believe there are
sufficient parallels and similarities with other areas of
Australia to make the general points move widely applicable.

The Murray Mallee: The History of Land Settlement and
Desertification'

One of the most notorious examples of desertification in
Australia is the Murray Mallee area, astride the South
Australian-Victorian border (Fig. 4.1). At the time of first
European settlement it was an undulating country of generally
parallel east-west Quaternary sand masses separated by
intervening flats and plains. The soils varied from coarse brown
to white sands in the highest rises to red-brown clay loams on
the plains between. Most soils were alkaline, well drained, but
low in nitrogen and phosphorous and occasionally deficient in
trace elements. In some of the plains the calcrete bedrock was
exposed. Rainfall, mainly in the winter season (May-October!,
decreased across the area from c. 340 mm in the southwest to 260
mm in the northeast, and the risk of crop failure from drought
ranged from 43 per cent to c. 70 per cent along the same gradient
(Table 4 1). With potential evaporation c. 2,500 mm and the
extensive sandy soils, permanent surface water was absent and
watercourses were rare, although scattered low points in the
plains occasionally held brackish water after rains. The native
vegetation was dominated by mallee-the collective name given to
eucalypt species forming shrubby multi-branched trees 2-12 metres
in height which, in dense stands, covered all but the poorest of
the higher sand rises and parts of the plains. On the rises a
heath association including hummock grasses (Triodia spp.)
thinned the mallee cover, while on the plains open grasslands
dotted by taller eucalypts and native pines (Callitris spp.)
broke the otherwise continuous mallee canopy with its herbaceous
understorey.

Despite the paucity of records there is sufficient evidence to
suggest that aboriginal groups moved through the area,
particularly after rains had left some surface water on the
plains and in the occasional rock crevices, hunting grey and red
kangaroos, small rodents, emus, and Mallee fowl. Moving in from
the relatively densely populated Murray River frontages, they
appear to have fired parts of the mallee as part of their hunting
technology, and some of the open grasslands of the plains may
have been fire-induced and maintained. Apart from these possible
effects and the few campsites (little more than hearths, fired
bones, and scattered worked-stone chips), there was little
apparent evidence of their occupation, and the first white
explorers thought they were exploring uninhabited country (Harris
1 970).

Initial European exploration found the waterless scrubs
unattractive, and occupation by whites was initially
temporary-pastoralists moving their flocks and herds in from the
permanently watered Murray River frontages to the grasslands,
like the aborigines only when some surface water was apparent.
From the 1840s through the 1850s and 1860s such use was scattered
in space and intermittent in time. Underground water of variable
quality was discovered and some pastoral stations became
permanent bases, but droughts and the arrival of rabbits in
the1870 seriously reduced the available feed supplies and
pastoralists suffered significant losses.

TABLE 4.1 Field Survey Site Characteristics, Murray Mallee

Name
State

Low Risk Sites

High Risk Sites

Pinnaroo
S.A.

Murrayville
Vic.

Paruna
S,A.

Millewa
Vic.

A. Physical Characteristics:

Annual rainfall (mm)

340

320

274

267

Growing season rainfall
(mm)a

212

196

172

152

Drought risk (%)b

43

ca.43

ca.67

ca.70

B. Respondents:

1 ) Sample

-N 66

52

63

82

-% of site farmers ca.33

ca.33

ca.33

ca.66

2) Tenure:

Owner

87

84

83

85

Tenant

2

2

2

4

Sharefarmer

11

8

10

9

Other

0

6

5

2

100%

100%

100%

100

3) Age:

Under 30

13

21

13

9

30- 50

44

34

66

53

51-70

40

38

19

33

Over 70

3

7

2

5

100%

100%

100%

100

4) Size of farm: ac (ha)

Less than 1,000 (405)

26

23

3

1

1,000-1,999 (405-810)

45

28

16

0

2,000-5,999 (810-2,430)

29

47

52

93

Over 6,000 (over
2,430)

0

2

28

6

100%

100%

100%

100

5) Drought experience:

None

3

2

8

5

One (1967)

11

18

22

12

Two (1959& 1967)

38

25

27

34

Three or more

(1944/5,1959,
1967)

48

55

43

50

1 00%

1 00%

1 00%

1 00

a. Rainfall in period April to October.
b. the number of years in a hundred in which the growing season
of continuously effective rainfall is less than five months.
After Trumble 1948, with estimates for Victorian sites from
Hannay 1965.
c. Data from field surveys 1971-72.

Prior to the 1880s agricultural land use had not been
attempted in the mallee. Apart from reservations about the
fertility of the soil and the shortage of water, a major problem
was the cost of land clearance, since the multi branched mallee
was expensive to cut down and regrowth continued indefinitely
unless the roots were grubbed out. By the late 1880s, however, a
combination of innovations in agricultural technology, the
occupation of the remaining relatively attractive agricultural
country in South Australia and Victoria, and reverses from
drought on the northern fringes of the agricultural lands in
South Australia (Meinig 1962) encouraged a renewed interest in
the Mallee. Technological innovation significantly reduced the
labour costs in land clearance and agriculture:

1) "Mallee rollers" (often old steam boilers, or
tree trunks, pulled by 6-8 horses) knocked down the scrub faster
and cheaper than a team of axemen, and the dead trees were
eventually burned.

2) Stump-jump ploughs developed in South Australia in 1876,
jigged through the stumps, the plough shares kicking up over
stones or uncleared roots.

3) The grain crops were harvested by various types of
mechanical "headers" developed locally from the 1880s
onwards, the grain heads being chopped off,

Source: Official records and Atlas of Australian Resources,
Canberra, 1959.leaving the long-strawed stubble to provide a hot
burn to kill off the mallee regrowth.

4) More drought-resistant wheat varieties began to appear,
more suitable to the lower rainfall country. Early maturing
varieties had been developed in South Australia in the 1860s and
American hybrids provided further genes for local official and
private innovations in the 1880s.

These events led to renewed official surveys of the mallee
country and a reappraisal of the agricultural potential. The
result was legislation to open up the better soils for
agricultural settlement from about 1900 onwards, and a
chequerboard pattern of roads, railways, grainfields, homesteads,
and townsites began to be imposed upon the landscape (Fig. 4.2).
Land was surveyed, road alignments cleared, and government
railways built. Farmers moved in, began to clear the scrub, build
homesteads, perhaps got their first income from sale of mallee
roots for domestic fuel to the cities, reaped their first crops
and carted them to the rail sidings for export. From the outset,
this was commercial market-oriented development. Clearance of
"new" land for settlement was seen both as meeting a
demand from immigrants for land as a home and as meeting an
international market demand for increased grain supplies. The
pattern, modified in detail but basically similar in components,
was repeated throughout the Murray Mallee over the period from
1900 to 1930.

Expansion of grain farming over this period was further
assisted by the discovery and application of superphosphates to
improve the fertility of the poorer soils and by offical South
Australian government sponsorship of American "dry
farming" techniques from 1906 onwards. By this method bare
fallowing over a cat 10-month period was used to conserve and
thus, in theory, add one season's rainfall to the next for a
wheat crop every two years. Despite periodic droughts the cropped
area inceased and population densities built up to peaks in the
1930s (Fig. 4.3). The apparent conquest of the
"wilderness" was seen as a triumph of human ingenuity
backed by official land settlement policies and transport
systems.

From the 1930s, however, the process of desertification became
evident. With market prices falling, the area under production
(which implied also the area under fallow) was increased and the
droughts and high winds of the 1930s and 1944-45 in particular
reactivated the Quaternary dune systems. Crops were sand-blasted
or blown away, fields lost their topsoil, north-south roads
across the dunes were repeatedly buried under mobile drifts,
irrigation canals filled in, railways were blocked, and farm
equipment and occasionally barns and houses were buried. As
bankrupt farmers walked off their properties, the similarity to
the Dust Bowl in the United States was not lost on the state
government officials.

As in the United States, a massive governmental response was
initiated. The Marginal Lands Scheme (which operated over the
period 1939 to 1961) provided Commonwealth funds (some $4
million) to buy out bankrupt or what were thought to be
uneconomic farms. These were then subdivided to provide the
surviving neighbouring properties with extra land to increase
returns and encourage a shift in resource use from monoculture of
cereals to mixed farming with sheep being grazed on rotation
pastures and stubbles. In addition, the state governments wrote
off some farmers' debts-which meant in some cases retailers got
only one shilling in the pound (5 per cent) on their outstanding
bills! -and granted carry-on loans to others.

This structural organization of the farm production system was
paralleled by intensified official research activity, aimed at
providing skills in controlling soil erosion, crop rotations to
build up soil fertility and structure and reduce plant diseases,
drought-resistant crop varieties, and hardy grasses to colonize
the mobile sands. These innovations, combined with favourable
(drought-free) seasons and high market prices in the
1950s,enabled a rapid recovery of the farmers' fortunes and an
apparent control of the main desertification process. Such was
the transformation that by 1965 confidence in the Northern Mallee
had reached a new peak. Such was the general optimism that one
commentator concluded in 1965 that "we can say that there is
a satisfactory answer to the main (technical) problems and that
production can and will be raised by at least 50 per cent within
the next decade." Drift had been largely controlled and
cereal and sheep production were increasing rapidly. Land values
doubled in some areas between 1962 and 1966. [Potter et a/. 1973,104]

TABLE 4.2. Soil Erosion and Land Clearance in the South
Australian Murray Mallee, 1970s

Area

(000 ha)

%

A. Soil Erosion

Total area in use

1,858.7

100

1) Area susceptible to
erosion

405.3

21.8

2) Area where urgent and
drastictreatment is required

20.0

1.1

Total Area

Area Cleared of

(000 ha)

Natural

Vegetation

(ha)

%

B. Land Clearance

1) Murray Mallee Study Area:

County Alfred

370.8

344.8

93

County Chandos

398.7

292.0

73

2) South Australia:

Settled Area

15,989.1

11,744.7

74

State Area

98,438.1

( 11,744.7)

(12)

a. Williams 1978.
b. S.A.I.D.C. 1976.
c. The S.A.I.D.C. 1976 report only covered the area within the
proclaimed hundreds l= 16% of state), which is the main settled
area of the state. Hence the figures for clearance for State Area
are estimates.

Such enthusiasm led to further clearance of mallee under
government scrub-clearance subsidies and a temporary reversal of
the decline in cropped area (Fig. 4.3).

The enthusiasm, however, was to be short-lived. Droughts in
1966-67 and 1970-71, together with government quotas on wheat
production from 1969 to 1972 and falling prices for grains and
wool in the early 1970s, renewed fears of a depression, and dust
storms gave evidence of renewed desertification.

By the end of the 1970s the future of the area was again in
doubt. Wind erosion was active, and while urgent soil
conservation measures were needed on only cat 1 per cent of the
South Australian area, a fifth of the area (ca. 22 per cent) was
likely to erode if farm management was neglected (Table 4.2) and
concern over illegal clearance of areas supposedly reserved
(because of the erosion potential) had led to proposals to
tighten up existing soil conservation legislation (S.A.I.D.C.
1976, 24).

In South Australia, as part of a policy of decentralization,
the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries has begun to review
the research needs of the state's primary industries.
Significantly the first of such reviews was on the Murray Mallee
(Fawcett 1978). In Victoria, the Land Conservation Council (set
up in 1970 to advise the State Minister of Lands on appropriate
use of Crown lands) has just completed revision of an earlier
report on the Mallee area in which the problems of indiscriminate
land clearance were outlined (V.L.C.C. 1976). Official concern
and action continues, therefore, despite the earlier belief that
the problems of the area had been met.

Research Method and Study Sites

To attempt to understand the role, if any, of human perception
of resource management in the continued threat of desertification
in the Mallee, the results of a recently completed field study of
local attitudes to resource management were reexamined in
association with archival search of recent official
decision-making, media coverage of conditions in the area, and
interviews with relevant officials. Because of the complexity of
the definition of desertification, the surrogate of "soil
erosion" was used here as in chapter 3. Thus attitudes and
actions with regard to soil erosion have been culled from a
variety of sources for consideration here.

The original field study involved interviews with 263 farmers
and 31 non-farmers living in the area, in four separate sites
chosen to provide a spectrum of drought risk and including areas
in both states (Table 4.1). Thus the environmental gradient and
possible political contrasts in land settlement and management
policies were seen as variables. The field questionnaire, based
upon that used in the international natural hazards studies
(White 1974, 6-101,was designed to allow variables such as
education, family responsibility, and experience on farm to be
tested in relation to attitudes on resource management.

The detailed physical characteristics of the four sites are
illustrated in Figs. 4.4 and 4.5 and Table 4.3. Although the
general comments on the Murray Mallee apply, the history of land
settlement of each site varies in detail. The Pinnaroo site was
surveyed for agriculture in 1904 with additions to the south in
the 1920s, the railway arrived in 1906, and agricultural
occupation was mainly completed by 1914. The Murrayville site was
surveyed and occupied soon after 1906, the railway from Ouyen
arrived in 1908, and again most farms were occupied by 1914. The
northern sites were developed later. The Paruna site was occupied
partially by settlers from the Murray River after 1906, but most
farms date from the arrival of the railway in 1914. The Millewa
site was the last to be occupied, the railway from Redcliffs
reaching Werrimull by 1923 and Morkalla by 1925. Because of
inadequate groundwater here, a costly and grossly inefficient
system of irrigation channels had to be dug to bring River Murray
water during the winter months to fill domestic and stockwater
storages for the summer.

By the 1960 the family farms were still dominant (79-91 per
cent of the total) and ranged in size from 400 to 1300 ha. Of the
original vegetation less than 20 per cent remained on the farms.
South Australian farms had a higher proportion of land in
improved grazing ((lucerne, clovers, and sown grasses) than
Victorian farms (45 per cent of their area compared to 9 per
cent) and a correspondingly smaller area in grain crops (13 per
cent and 30 per cent, respectively). Surprisingly, the area in
fallow was still significant in Victoria (21 per cent) compared
with South Australia (3 per cent). More livestock were carried in
South Australia (an average of 1,700 sheep compared with 400 in
Victoria) and incomes varied accordingly.

Grain crops provided 82 per cent of income in Victoria, with
only 7 per cent from wool, whereas in South Australia the figures
were 40 per cent and 42 per cent, respectively.

Before examining the perceptions of desertification in the
Murray Mallee, however, it will be useful to identify the various
"interested parties"-those people or institutions who
had some potential motive for concern about the problem.

Characteristics of the Perceivers

The Role of Governments

Because the history of land settlement in Australia from the
1850s onwards has reflected fluctuating but always significant
official land settlement policies, the governments' perceptions
of the land resources have influenced actual resource use. This
influence has been stronger than that in the United States and
has shown greater variation because